What would you do if you were told that you had inoperable lung cancer, then told it was a mistake, then, oops! another mistake, and yes, you were indeed an immediate candidate for the Grim Reaper?

That’s the highly dramatic predicament in which Ginger, a successful novelist and rather less successful wife and mother,

finds herself in Marsha Norman’s new play “Trudy Blue” at the MCC Theater.

Even worse, Ginger — played by the superbly incisive Polly Draper in a riveting performance — finds that in order to die at peace, she has first to surmount the fantasies of her own novelistic creations.

Her mind, and even her conversations, leap and loop backwards together with those of Trudy Blue — a dashingly sexy performance from Sarah Knowlton — who’s part fictional alter ego and part wish-fulfillment, and who has a wild romantic life.

It is to Norman’s credit — and to director Michael Sexton’s — that slowly but surely, this hodgepodge of events maintains interest, even as the action seems to take one step back for every two steps forward.

Yet even with that and with Draper’s moving portrait of the artist as a young imminent corpse, the play turns on its own axis so much that in the end it runs up its own spindle into a kind of odd anti-climax. So she died, you think. Okay, then what happened?

Still, “Trudy Blue” makes for a

semi-interesting,

if hysterically characterized, journey. Do many writers — even when facing death — have such terrifyingly realistic fantasy lives? Perhaps they do.

Everything old is new again, especially at the end of our tattered century. There’s “Marie Christine,” Michael John LaChiusa’s recycling of “Medea” at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, while downtown at the Public Theater’s Shiva auditorium, we have “In the Blood,” playwright Suzan-Lori Park’s reworking Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter.” This in fact is not so much a recycling of “The Scarlet Letter,” a work of considerably more moral complexity than the play, but a jazz-like riff on the themes of exclusion, sin and adultery.

The play is such a welcome improvement in clarity and dramatic purpose over Park’s earlier work that I may be in danger of over-praising it. It is an overly simplistic tale, told in clumsy neo-Brechtian terms, of a welfare mother who has given birth to five children with five different fathers.

This Mother Courage of the ghetto (passionately played by the splendid Charlayne Woodard) maintains her dignity despite all, but the crudely drawn medium hardly sustains the crudely obvious message. But this time around, Parks’ play can be readily comprehended, and the performances of the cast and the staging by David Esbjornson proved admirable.

A final word or three for a largely new cast — including Ken Page, Ann Duqesnay and Christiane Noll — in the musical revue “It Ain’t Nothin’ But the Blues,” now freshly and happily ensconced at the Ambassador Theater. It’s a show with passion, spirit and fun, and looks particularly fine on its new and smaller stage.